Jewish Peace News (JPN) is an information service that circulates news clippings, analyses, editorial commentary, and action alerts concerning the Israel / Palestine conflict. We work to promote a just resolution to the conflict; we believe that the cause of both peace and justice will be served when Israel ends the occupation, withdrawing completely from the Palestinian territories and finding a solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis within the framework of international law.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Cecilie Surasky provides background information to a letter written by Judith Butler, Ronnie Gilbert and Aurora Levins Morales in response to further efforts by the San Francico Jewish Federation to decide which Jews have the right to speak, and which ones should be silenced.Racheli Gai.

Cecilie Surasky: Will the Jewish Federation of San Francisco drive more people into the arms of BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanction)? Judith Butler, Ronnie Gilbert and Aurora Levins Morales respond

Nov. 16, 2009

Here is an embarrassingly McCarthyite response to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival's decision to a) screen the film Rachel by Jewish-Israeli filmmaker Simone Bitton, b) invite Cindy Corrie to speak and c) ask Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and the American Friends Service Committee to co-sponsor (as they have for many years).

A full-page ad complete with billowing Israeli flag and blue skies appeared this week in the San Francisco Bay Area's Jewish newspaper, J, urging the SF Jewish Federation to pass this resolution at their November 19, 2009 board meeting:

"The S.F. Jewish Federation will not support events or organizations that demonize or defame Israel. Nor will it support organizations that partner in their events with individuals or groups that call for boycotts, divestment or sanctions (BDS) against Israel."

Exemplifying the disproportionate role that big money plays in the institutional Jewish world, the first signer in a list of 36 is real estate investor Sanford Diller, know for his record-breaking$35 million donation to The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). He is also a funder of well-known Islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, the Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Diller signed a prior letter in the J which he and another real estate investor, Israel 21C chair Zvi Alon, and the Hoover Institute's Abraham Sofaer, claimed the right to determine who, essentially, is Jewish and who is not.

This is a remarkable resolution which may very well pass, even though clearly none of its authors have stopped to consider its implications. The resolution would bar Jewish Federation funding recipients from partnering not just with groups, but with individuals, who support any form of boycotts, divestment or sanctions.

Given its vague wording, if the Jewish Community Center or a campus Hillel invites anyone from Adrienne Rich to Joe Klein to Howard Zinn or Naomi Klein, or any number of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis to speak, they will lose Federation funding. It means the Jewish Film Festival can't show any more Yes Men or Udi Aloni films. And it certainly will categorically bar countless Palestinians from ever setting foot on the stage of a Bay Area Jewish institution, lest that institution lose its funding.

In July, the ($400 million) Koret-Taube foundations wrote this error-riddled missive critical of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival:

"It is partnering with Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, two virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Both are closely associated with the International Solidarity Movement and other groups that aid and abet terror against the Jewish State. These groups cross the line for inclusion in the Jewish community. "In a different statement, billionaire investor Warren Hellman also said the Federation would pressure the film festival to adopt new policies regarding co-presenters and guests.

So far the festival has lost 5 board members and tens of thousands of dollars in funding.

Emblematic of how the battle lines are being drawn, 3 major Jewish thinkers and artists have responded to these efforts. Judith Butler is a true academic rock star, one of the world's sharpest thinkers on gender, power and identity. A grand dame of political folk music, Ronnie Gilbert is something of an expert on McCarthyism: she was blacklisted, along with Pete Seeger, when they were part of the bestselling singing group, The Weavers. And finally, Aurora Levins Morales, who is Latina and Jewish, is one of the most artful and wise voices anywhere on plural identities in the Jewish world. They also happen to be on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace (sponsors of Muzzlewatch), the Jewish group that is the primary target of these efforts to ban Jews (and Quakers) from the community.

Jewish Voice for Peace advisory board members respond to efforts by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and others to police acceptable forms of Jewish identity and cultural expression.

By Judith Butler, Ronnie Gilbert and Aurora Levins Morales

"The San Francisco Jewish Community Federation ran an ad entitled "Setting the Record Straight" in the October 16 edition of j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California. The next week, j. printed another op-ed entitled "To heal post-'Rachel' rift, Federation needs a new policy." As members of the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Advisory Board, we must respond to both of these statements.

Like the Federation, we value the contributions of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival over the past 29 years. JVP has been proud to support the Festival by co-presenting several films in recent years. The Festival has been an important cultural force in the Bay Area Jewish community precisely because of its commitment to presenting a wide variety of ideas and perspectives and its willingness to explore controversial issues. As such, it is critical that the Festival's programming choices not be subject to undue pressure from funders.

We are therefore dismayed that the Federation is attempting to put constraints on the Festival's choice of speakers and co-presenters, in order to stop them from choosing Jewish Voice for Peace and the pacifist Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, as co-presenters in the future.

Furthermore, in the October 23 j. op-ed, three individuals set themselves up as a Jewish community version of the House Un-American Activities Committee, demanding a blacklist for alleged "anti-Israel" organizations.

Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization of Jews working for peace, security, justice, and human rights for both Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the only way to achieve a just peace and is in the best interests of Israelis and Jews everywhere. These beliefs are shared by thousands of Bay Area Jews, and hundreds of thousands of Jews across the U.S and around the globe. It is unacceptable for the Federation, an organization that claims to promote "mutual respect and accommodation of diversity within Jewish life," to attempt to shut out our organization and the large and growing segment of the Bay Area Jewish community that JVP represents.

Netanyahu has thumbed his nose at Obama's request for a settlement freeze, and his foreign minister, a West Bank settler, refuses to participate in the peace process. It is not realistic to expect this government to make any meaningful moves toward peace without outside pressure. The boycott/divestment/sanctions movement (BDS) encompasses a variety of tactics and targets, and people of good will do disagree about their use. We at JVP are not of one mind about this movement. But we all agree that boycott/divestment/sanctions is a non-violent approach to applying pressure on the Israeli government. And we believe that no one should be demonized for using nonviolent forms of protest in the effort to change policy, especially policy as deadly serious as this.

For too long, our community institutions such as the Federation have remained silent in the face of ever-growing Israeli settlement expansion, human rights abuses and other policies which have created major obstacles to peace. For too long, their "support for Israel" has in practice meant tacit support for policies that undermine the cause of peace and security, endangering both Israelis and Palestinians.JVP's 90,000 supporters include countless individuals of all ages who play vital roles in upholding and strengthening a diverse and dynamic Jewish community through their participation in religious life, culture, academia and politics. And our numbers are growing. We reject this attempt to isolate and silence the growing number of U.S. Jews who see our work as an important expression of Jewish values. We invite members of the Jewish community who believe in full equality for all people to join us. We urge all those who disagree with our beliefs or our tactics to recognize that ethical debate is part of our tradition, and to embrace the full breadth and diversity of Jewish identity, thinking and expression. Finally, we invite all Jews, whether or not you agree with us, to defend freedom of expression in our community as an essential part of any lasting solution."

Judith Butler is Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ronnie Gilbert is an American folk singer and writer, and was a member of the singing group the Weavers with Pete Seeger. The Weavers were blacklisted in the 50s.

Aurora Levins Morales is a poet, essayist, community historian and activist.

A small number of wealthy machers can use their economic clout to try to determine Jewish morality, but in the end they will fail, and they will have no one to blame but themselves. This McCarthyite behavior is exactly what radicalizes Jews, young and old alike, and send us screaming into the arms of the comparatively more thoughtful, moral and nuanced promoters of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.When institutional Jewry's so-called leaders stand so brazenly against the entire human rights world, as they have time and time again; when they plug their ears while singing "nah nah nah nah" as more and more land and lives are taken; when they fight every mild effort to get Israel to stop its settlement expansion and repression of Palestinians and, increasingly, Israeli human rights activists, what exactly do they expect?That good, decent, compassionate people who care deeply about equality and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis, will shut up and go away? No, we will escalate our nonviolent methods.You, Jewish leaders, have left us no choice. You started the BDS movement. Only you can stop it. Trying to ban free speech and free thought; trying to ignore Israel's continued egregious violations of human rights and its march towards the right; trying to fight any and all forms of criticism and truth-telling only sends more people to the other side. When will you understand that? Instead, consider choosing to build a world in which both Palestinians and Israelis have the same rights and opportunities. That would be, without doubt, good for the Jews.-Cecilie SuraskyJewish Voice for Peace, Muzzlewatch

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Ali Abunimah is a prominent defender of a single democratic state in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In this article he makes the now quite common – though also controversial – comparison with Apartheid South Africa. Usually the question this comparison raises is whether Israeli treatment of Palestinians is really analogous to or as bad as the Apartheid regime's treatment of its black majority, and the comparison is often used to support the use of tactics of resistance like BDS modeled on the anti-Apartheid campaigns of the 1980s. But Abunimah instead hones narrowly in on the hostility of the white minority in South Africa to a multi-racial democratic state, a hostility that persisted until surprisingly shortly before change was initiated. It is this that he compares, in a wealth of detail, with Jewish Israeli fears of a single state solution. If change could occur in South Africa in spite of such widespread rejection in the white community, why, Abuminahargues, should change not occur in Israel despite the fears of the Jewish community? It won't happen, he recognizes without outside pressure (and he supports BDS); but current Jewish Israeli rejection need not make it impossible.

This is surely true, but 'not necessarily impossible' is very far from showing that a one-state solution ought to be the aspiration of activist movements, Palestinian, Jewish or otherwise. As his banner quotation from Shimon Peres – a barely veiled threat – makes clear, it remains quite possible that a one-state 'solution' will involve no diminution of violence towards or oppression of Palestinians. One state is, after all, what there is now. What might make it important to explore a one state possibility is the fact, clearly motivating Abunimah, that two viable states are now impossible. Certainly he is correct to say that there is presently no political will in the Israeli or US administrations to move in the direction of a viable Palestinian state and reasonable opinions can differ on whether the current 'facts on the ground' make it impossible to eke out such a state. But it is also surely true that activist pressure can be brought to bear both on that politicalwill and even on the facts on the ground and this pressure has a natural point of application in the official commitment of Israel, the US, the PA (and even Hamas) to two states. If change is possible, as Abunimah argues, on the one state solution, then it is certainly possible for two states. But if two states can be achieved, then this removes a big chunk of the motivation for directing one's energies to one state. Indeed, aiming for two viable states in the medium term is not inconsistent with seeking to build consensus, along the lines Abunimah suggests, for single state in the long term.

The question is by no means an obvious one to resolve, but it is important to consider where activist energies are most likely to have an effect, and avoid directions that absorb energy with little hope of result. Indeed some commentators have suggested that the one state solution has become increasingly acceptable in the mainstream US media precisely because it is so unlikely to come about that it represents – from the point of view of the status quo – a harmless safety valve through which to discharge otherwise potentially dangerous activist pressure. Alistair Welchman

Anyone who rejects the two-state solution, won't bring a one-state solution. They will instead bring one war, not one state. A bloody war with no end. -- Israeli President Shimon Peres, 7 November 2009.

One of the most commonly voiced objections to a one-state solution for Palestine/Israel stems from the accurate observation that the vast majority of Israeli Jews reject it, and fear being "swamped" by a Palestinian majority. Across the political spectrum, Israeli Jews insist on maintaining a separate Jewish-majority state.

But with the total collapse of the Obama Administration's peace efforts, and relentless Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, the reality is dawning rapidly that the two-state solution is no more than a slogan that has no chance of being implemented or altering the reality of a de facto binational state in Palestine/Israel.

This places an obligation on all who care about the future of Palestine/Israel to seriously consider the democratic alternatives. I have long argued that the systems in post-apartheid South Africa (a unitary democratic state), and Northern Ireland (consociational democracy) -- offer hopeful, real-life models.

But does solid Israeli Jewish opposition to a one-state solution mean that a peaceful one-state outcome is so unlikely that Palestinians should not pursue it, and should instead focus only on "pragmatic" solutions that would be less fiercely resisted by Israeli Jews?

The experience in South Africa suggests otherwise. In 1994, white-minority rule -- apartheid -- came to a peaceful, negotiated end, and was replaced (after a transitional period of power-sharing) with a unitary democratic state with a one person, one vote system. Before this happened, how likely did this outcome look? Was there any significant constituency of whites prepared to contemplate it, and what if the African National Congress (ANC) had only advanced political solutions that whites told pollsters they would accept?

Until close to the end of apartheid, the vast majority of whites, including many of the system's liberal critics, completely rejected a one person, one vote system, predicting that any attempt to impose it would lead to a bloodbath. As late as 1989, F.W. de Klerk, South Africa's last apartheid president, described a one person, one vote system as the "death knell" for South Africa.

A 1988 study by political scientist Pierre Hugo documented the widespread fears among South African whites that a transition to majority rule would entail not only a loss of political power and socioeconomic status, but engendered "physical dread" and fear of "violence, total collapse, expulsion and flight." Successive surveys showed that four out of five whites thought that majority rule would threaten their "physical safety." Such fears were frequently heightened by common racist tropes of inherently savage and violent Africans, but the departure of more than a million white colons from Algeria and the airlifting of 300,000 whites from Angola during decolonization set terrifying precedents ("Towards darkness and death: racial demonology in South Africa," The Journal of Modern African Studies, 26(4), 1988).

Throughout the 1980s, polls showed that even as whites increasingly understood that apartheid could not last, only a small minority ever supported majority rule and a one person, one vote system. In a March 1986 survey, for example, 47 percent of whites said they would favor some form of "mixed-race" government, but 83 percent said they would opt for continued white domination of the government if they had the choice (Peter Goodspeed, "Afrikaners cling to their all-white dream," The Toronto Star, 5 October 1986).

A 1990 nationwide survey of Afrikaner whites (native speakers of Afrikaans, as opposed to English, and who traditionally formed the backbone of the apartheid state), found just 2.2 percent were willing to accept a "universal franchise with majority rule" (Kate Manzo and Pat McGowan, "Afrikaner fears and the politics of despair: Understanding change in South Africa," International Studies Quarterly, 36, 1992).

Perhaps an enlightened white elite was able to lead the white masses to higher ground? This was not the case either. A 1988 academic survey of more than 400 white politicians, business and media leaders, top civil servants, academics and clergy found that just 4.8 percent were prepared to accept a unitary state with a universal voting franchise and two-thirds considered such an outcome "unacceptable." According to Manzo and McGowan, white elites reflected the sentiments and biases of the rest of the society and overwhelmingly considered whites inherently more civilized and culturally superior to black Africans. Just more than half of prominent whites were prepared to accept "a federal state in which power is shared between white and non-white groups and areas so that no one group dominates."

During the 1980s, the white electorate in South Africa moved to the right, as Israel's Jewish electorate is doing today. Support seeped from the National Party, which had established formal apartheid in 1948, to the even more extreme Conservative Party. Yet, "on the issue of majority rule," Hugo observed, "supporters of the National Party and the Conservative Party, as well as most white voters to the 'left' of these organizations, ha[d] little quarrel with each other."

The vast majority of whites, wracked with existential fears, were simply unable to contemplate relinquishing effective control, or at least a veto, over political decision-making in South Africa.

Yet, the African National Congress insisted firmly on a one person, one vote system with no white veto. As the township protests and strikes and international pressure mounted, The Economist observed in an extensive 1986 survey of South Africa published on 1 February of that year, that many "enlightened" whites "still fondly argue that a dramatic improvement in the quality of black life may take the revolutionary sting out of the black townships -- and persuade 'responsible' blacks, led by the emergent black middle class, to accept some power-sharing formula."

Schemes to stabilize the apartheid system abounded, and bear a strong resemblance to the current Israeli government's vision of "economic peace" in which a collaborationist Palestinian Authority leadership would manage a still-subjugated Palestinian population anesthetized by consumer goods and shopping malls.

Because of the staunch opposition of whites to a unitary democratic state, the ANC heard no shortage of advice from western liberals that it should seek a "realistic" political accommodation with the apartheid regime, and that no amount of pressure could force whites to succumb to the ANC's political demands. The ANC was warned that insistence on majority rule would force Afrikaners into the "laager" -- they would retreat into a militarized garrison state and siege economy, preferring death before surrender.

Even the late Helen Suzman, one of apartheid's fiercest liberal critics, predicted in 1987, as quoted by Hugo, "The Zimbabwe conflict took 15 years ... and cost 20,000 lives and I can assure you that the South African transfer of power will take a good deal more than that, both in time and I am afraid lives."

But as The Economist observed, the view that whites would prefer "collective suicide" was something of a caricature. The vast majority of Afrikaners were "no longer bible-thumping boers." They were "part of a spoilt, affluent suburban society, whose economic pain threshold may prove to be rather low."

The Economist concluded that if whites would only come so far voluntarily, then it was perfectly reasonable for the anti-apartheid movement to bring them the rest of the way through "coercion" in the form of sanctions and other forms of pressure. "The quicker the white tribe submits," the magazine wrote, "the better its chance of a bearable future in a black-ruled South Africa."

Ultimately, as we now know, the combination of internal resistance and international isolation did force whites to abandon political apartheid and accept majority rule. However, it is important to note that the combined strength of the anti-apartheid movement never seriously threatened the physical integrity of the white regime.

Even after the massive township uprisings of 1985-86, the South African regime was secure. "So far there is no real physical threat to white power," The Economist noted, "so far there is little threat to white lives. ... The white state is mighty, and well-equipped. It has the capacity to repress the township revolts far more bloodily. The blacks have virtually no urban or rural guerrilla capacity, practically no guns, few safe havens within South Africa or without."

This balance never changed, and a similar equation could be written today about the relative power of a massively-armed -- and much more ruthless -- Israeli state, and lightly armed Palestinian resistance factions.

What did change for South Africa, and what all the weapons in the world were not able to prevent, was the complete loss of legitimacy of the apartheid regime and its practices. Once this legitimacy was gone, whites lost the will to maintain a system that relied on repression and violence and rendered them international pariahs; they negotiated a way out and lived to tell the tale. It all happened much more quickly and with considerably less violence than even the most optimistic predictions of the time. But this outcome could not have been predicted based on what whites said they were willing to accept, and it would not have occurred had the ANC been guided by opinion polls rather than the democratic principles of the Freedom Charter.

Zionism -- as many Israelis openly worry -- is suffering a similar, terminal loss of legitimacy as Israel is ever more isolated as a result of its actions. Israel's self-image as a liberal "Jewish and democratic state" is proving impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultra-nationalist Jewish sectarian settler-colony that must carry out frequent and escalating massacres of "enemy" civilians (Lebanon and Gaza 2006, Gaza 2009) in a losing effort to check the resistance of the region's indigenous people. Zionism cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.

Already difficult to disguise, the loss of legitimacy becomes impossible to conceal once Palestinians are a demographic majority ruled by a Jewish minority. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demand that Palestinians recognize Israel's "right to exist as a Jewish state" is in effect an acknowledgement of failure: without Palestinian consent, something which is unlikely ever to be granted, the Zionist project of a Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine has grim long-term prospects.

Similarly, South African whites typically attempted to justify their opposition to democracy, not in terms of a desire to preserve their privilege and power, but using liberal arguments about protecting distinctive cultural differences. Hendrik Verwoerd Jr., the son of assassinated Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid's founder, expressed the problem in these terms in 1986, as reported by The Toronto Star, stating that, "These two people, the Afrikaner and the black, are not capable of becoming one nation. Our differences are unique, cultural and deep. The only way a man can be happy, can live in peace, is really when he is among his own people, when he shares cultural values."

The younger Verwoerd was on the far-right of South African politics, leading a quixotic effort to carve out a whites-only homeland in the heart of South Africa. But his reasoning sounds remarkably similar to liberal Zionist defenses of the "two-state solution" today. The Economist clarified the use of such language at the time, stating that "One of the weirder products of apartheid is the crippling of language in a maw of hypocrisy, euphemism and sociologese. You talk about the Afrikaner 'right to self-determination' -- meaning power over everybody else."

Zionism's claim for "Jewish self-determination" amidst an intermixed population, is in effect a demand to preserve and legitimize a status quo in which Israeli Jews exercise power in perpetuity. But there's little reason to expect that Israeli Jews would abandon this quest voluntarily any more than South African whites did. As in South Africa, coercion is necessary -- and the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is one of the most powerful, nonviolent, legitimate and proven tools of coercion that Palestinians possess. Israel's vulnerabilities may be different from those of apartheid South Africa, but Israel is not invulnerable to pressure.

Coercion is not enough, however; as I have long argued, and sought to do, Palestinians must also put forward a positive vision. Neither can Palestinians advocating a one-state solution simply disregard the views of Israeli Jews. We must recognize that the opposition of Israeli Jews to any solution that threatens their power and privilege stems from at least two sources. One is irrational, racist fears of black and brown hordes (in this case, Arab Muslims) stoked by decades of colonial, racist demonization. The other source -- certainly heightened by the former -- are normal human concerns about personal and family dislocation, loss of socioeconomic status and community security: change is scary.

But change will come. Without indulging Israeli racism or preserving undue privilege, the legitimate concerns of ordinary Israeli Jews can be addressed directly in any negotiated transition to ensure that the shift to democracy is orderly, and essential redistributive policies are carried out fairly. Inevitably, decolonization will cause some pain as Israeli Jews lose power and privilege, but there are few reasons to believe it cannot be a well-managed process, or that the vast majority of Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, would not be prepared to make the adjustment for the sake of a normality and legitimacy they cannot have any other way.

This is where the wealth of research and real-life experience about the successes, failures, difficulties and opportunities of managing such transitions at the level of national and local politics, neighborhoods, schools and universities, workplaces, state institutions and policing, emerging from South Africa and Northern Ireland, will be of enormous value.

Every situation has unique features, and although there are patterns in history, it never repeats itself exactly. But what we can conclude from studying the pasts and presents of others is that Palestinians and Israelis are no less capable of writing themselves a post-colonial future that gives everyone a chance at a life worth living in a single, democratic state.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Henry Siegman, former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America, is an ordained Orthodox rabbi, and currently president of the US Middle East Project; he has authored numerous articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see, for example, his noted 2007 critique of peace negotiations under President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam"). I want to comment briefly on Siegman's response yesterday to Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston's recent charges that Siegman's views make him an Israel-hater.

Siegman's offense, in Burston's view, was to have claimed recently in the New York Times that Israelis dislike President Barack Obama because they fear that he "is serious about ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza." More fundamentally, Siegman asserted in the Times article, Israelis' refusal to support ending the occupation and removing illegal settlements demonstrates that they are unable "to adjust to the Jewish people's reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood." In light of such commentary, Burston claims that Siegman inexcusably must believe that there is something "fundamentally defective" about the Israeli people themselves.

In his response, published in Ha'aretz, Siegman counters that Ha'aretz's Burston himself has repeatedly made similar points about Israel's dysfunctional approach to negotiations: Israelis are resorting to their "aging instincts" in defining the conflict with the Palestinians in terms of the Holocaust, Burston has argued in the past, and Israeli politicians are willing to portray any compromise as a potentially mortal sacrifice, thereby negating the need to ease the suffering of others. Siegman reminds us that this sense of victimhood is called "galut [diaspora] mentality" in Israel; I say it should really be called "bunker mentality"—or perhaps "Hummer mentality"—to indicate the hypermilitarized doctrine that has arisen in tandem with the messianic territorial claims of Greater Israel ideology. For just as, in recent American military conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Humvee (a kind of moving bunker) is a synecdoche for the problem that external strength is never sufficient to protect obtruding human cargo from a determined resistance, likewise the Israeli "Hummer approach" to territorial control relies on brute force but exposes the country to the hazards of unjust occupation and international condemnation, ultimately weakening national existence. And like the Hummer's American sociological and economic trajectory from restricted military equipment to gas-guzzling consumer status item, the Israeli occupation has gone from being a relatively discreet project of the extreme right to one that now orients social values and dictates national policy.

Siegman reiterates, most crucially, the extent to which Israeli negotiations have relied on public declarations of sincerity accompanied by duplicitous state-supported expansion of settlements. Regarding Gaza, Siegman excoriates American and Israeli leaders for having disputed the veracity of the Goldstone fact-finding report, given that the deteriorating conditions Israel imposed on Gaza during the preceding ceasefire render hollow its claim to have launched the assault defensively. This, too, Burston himself earlier had affirmed, against the spin emanating from the Israeli government and media, in reporting the accusations of Israeli Brigadier-General Shmuel Zakai. Zakai, who commanded the IDF's Gaza division, minced no words: Israel had stoked Palestinian outrage during the period of truce. As Zakai put it clearly, "You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they're in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing."

The current Israeli government has refused to consider anything like a viable state for Palestinians, and has rejected even the minimal compromises previous governments had considered, while settlement construction continues at a torrid pace. This is evidence that Israel is not committed to a realistic peace settlement, despite its soothing public pronouncements. "If Israeli policy had truly aimed at a two-state solution, it could and would have happened long ago. Nothing would have more encouraged Palestinian efforts to overcome their many shortcomings, or to oppose their rejectionist groups, than a credible Israeli commitment to such a state." In light of what actually has occurred on the ground,, "blaming Palestinians for their misery," as Burston spuriously recommends, "is nothing more than a pretext for the continuation of a colonialist enterprise."

Siegman, who is known internationally as one of the most well-informed commentators on the Middle East, has not "gone off the rails," as Burston claims. He has spoken honestly at a time when, as Judge Richard Goldstone also knows, truthfulness and objectivity are not politically desirable qualities.

Monday, November 9, 2009

For those willing to level an unblinkered look at Israel today, the most obvious, glaring breach of its endlessly self-lauded democracy is the military occupation which still, after 42 years, holds millions of Palestinians stateless and right-less. However, Israel's illustrious "democracy" is also severely undemocratic inside the 1967 borders (or "green line"). A recently published US State Department report on freedom of religion focuses on one of the main axes along which the Israeli state differentiates between citizens, seriously discriminating those of them who are not Jewish or who the state does not consider Jewish and also, to some degree, discriminating observant Jews who do not conform to the state's definitions of orthodoxy. The first item below offers a brief overview of the State Department findings.

As reflected by this item, a central means for both practicing and concealing state discrimination in Israel is differential budgeting. The second item below refers to the discrimination practiced in the educational system in Israel, citing it among the reasons why Israeli universities should be viewed as part of the mechanism suppressing the Palestinian citizens of Israel and maintaining Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and its effective occupation of the Gaza Strip.

The item is a letter from Palestinian university students, citizens of Israel, calling the Board of Governors of Trondheim University in Norway to a vote in favor of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions at a vote scheduled for later this week. Their letter offers "another angle which affirms the need for boycott" and, among other things, they cite the discriminatory educational practices to which Palestinian students are subjected. Key among these and equally difficult to pin down with detailed, comparative data, is again economic discrimination. "Our schools," the students write the Trondheim board, "lack the basic facilities needed for education…"

In addition, they: "are not allowed to express our collective sentiments or ideas publicly. It is quite often that our public gatherings are not only violently interrupted by extreme right-wing Jewish students, but also in various occasions the universities called on the police to intervene. In several occasions, as during our peaceful demonstration in Haifa University against the War on Gaza, the police sent in large number of its special units which are infamous for their brutality … Moreover, the universities collaborate with the internal security services (the feared Shin Bet) and provide it with names of the activists among the students who are regularly summoned, investigated and threatened."

The students' letter, describing the systematically racist practices at both the state and the particular university level, provides a look at the extensive involvement of Israeli society in upholding, enabling and supporting the military occupation along with all its breaches of international law and conventions. Given the non-democracy they experience on a daily basis, the students argue, people the world over have an obligation to pressure Israel into abiding by international law, rather than aspiring to rewrite it to its benefit.

Tolerance toward minorities, egalitarian treatment of members of all ethnic groups, openness toward various streams in society, respect for sites holy to the other - these are all clear tests of a tolerant and pluralistic society. The new report from the United States Department of State on religious freedom in numerous countries around the world gives Israel a failing grade on all of these practices.

It's hard to find many democratic nations that provide the Americans with so much varied material on groups lacking a strong political pillar of support: from Muslims to Jehovah's Witnesses, from Reform Jews to Christians, from women to Bedouin. The report states that the U.S. Embassy in Israel "consistently raised concerns of religious freedom with the [Israel] Foreign Ministry, the police, the Prime Minister's office, and other government agencies."

The comprehensive document, written by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department, places both question marks and exclamation points after the banner of religious freedom for all - a cornerstone of Israel's public relations line. Ever since "the reunification of Jerusalem" in 1967, the government of Israel has boasted of freedom of worship for people of all religions. The American report notes that the 1967 law on the protection of holy places refers to all religious groups located throughout the country - including all parts of Jerusalem - and then adds: "The 1967 Protection of Holy Sites Law applies to holy sites of all religious groups within the country and in all of Jerusalem, but the government implements regulations only for Jewish sites. Non-Jewish holy sites do not enjoy legal protection under it because the government does not recognize them as official holy sites."

In certain areas of the country, according to the report, the government allows private individuals or local authorities to transform old mosques into galleries, restaurants and museums; restrictions on entry into non-Jewish holy sites and the policies concerning their protection have contributed to tensions in a religious context. A long-standing government policy has denied the unrecognized Bedouin locales ownership claims, applications to build and municipal services for their 80,000 inhabitants, and so this weak population has not been able to build new mosques or maintain existing ones.

At the end of 2008, there were 137 officially recognized holy sites, all of them Jewish. Moreover, the government of Israel has passed regulations for the identification, preservation and guarding of Jewish sites only. While well-known and familiar sites do receive protection de facto, because of their international importance, many Christian and Muslim sites are neglected, inaccessible or at risk of exploitation by real estate entrepreneurs and local authorities. The Christian pilgrimage sites around Lake Kinneret face creeping threats from regional planning commissions that want to use some of these areas for recreational purposes. In the past, only diplomatic intervention has succeeded in blocking such attempts.

The authors of the report, which is based on data compiled by the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, human rights organizations and various publications, note that government policy supports "the generally free practice of religion," but immediately thereafter they go on to say: "Government allocations of state resources favored Orthodox (including Modern and National Religious streams of Orthodoxy) and ultra-Orthodox (sometimes referred to as "Haredi") Jewish religious groups and institutions, discriminating against non-Jews and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism." Funding last year for institutions serving Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews came to NIS 1.6 billion, whereas religious minorities, which constitute 20 percent of the population, received only about NIS 54 million - less than 5 percent - of the budget.

The U.S. State Department has also taken note of the following practices carried out by the Israeli government: it does not recognize conversions to Judaism conducted by non-Orthodox rabbis; it funds Orthodox conversion programs, but does not support Reform and Conservative programs; it implements a policy based on Orthodox interpretation of religious law; it has discriminated against citizens belonging to other religious groups; and it funds the building of places of worship and cemeteries for Jews only. According to the government, however, while the budget does not cover the costs of building non-Jewish places of worship, it does support their maintenance - albeit at a very low level in comparison to synagogues.

The report makes it clear that phenomena which have become part of the standard practice in Israel are considered unacceptable in enlightened countries and should be corrected. More than 300,000 immigrants who are not considered Jews under rabbinical law are not able to marry and divorce in Israel or be buried in Jewish cemeteries. Civil marriage, non-Orthodox Jewish marriage or marriages between two people who belong to different religions must be performed outside the country to receive government recognition. A mite of consolation: In 2007 the government announced that it would permit consular marriages performed by diplomatic representatives in Israel for those who are listed as having no religion, or whose religious affiliation is with a sect not recognized by the state.

The document devotes considerable attention to what is sees as the customary discrimination of women: "The government, through the Chief Rabbinate, discriminates against women in civil status matters related to marriage and divorce. Under the Jewish religious court's interpretation of personal status law, a Jewish woman may not receive a final writ of divorce without her husband's consent. Consequently, thousands of women, so-called agunot - chained women - are unable to remarry or have legitimate children because their husbands have either disappeared or refused to grant divorces.

"The state transportation company, Egged, which operates the country's public transportation system, continued to operate sex-segregated buses along city and intra-city routes frequented by ultra-Orthodox Jews. Women who refuse to sit at the back of such buses risk harassment and physical assault by male passengers," the report continues. "Governmental authorities prohibit mixed gender prayer services at religious sites in deference to the belief of most Orthodox Jews that such services violate the precepts of Judaism. At the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, men and women must use separate areas to visit and pray. Women also are not allowed to conduct prayers at the Western Wall while wearing prayer shawls, which are typically worn by Jewish men, and are not permitted to read from Torah scrolls."

The report also quotes from a brochure the Chief Rabbinate distributes to bridegrooms, who are required to participate in pre-marital counseling by the Orthodox religious authorities in order to register for marriage. The brochure compares woman to clay and calls upon the husband to "shape and mold her as he pleases." The report says that the husband is also instructed not to become "spineless or tolerate disrespectful behavior from his wife: 'If she is disrespectful you must not give in; you can become angry and stop talking to her until she realizes she is wrong.' The husband is also admonished to compliment his wife regularly, 'even if it is a lie' because 'a woman who has not been complimented is like a fish out of water.'"

The U.S. State Department also reiterated its displeasure this year with a series of incidents in which Messianic Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses have been harassed. The latter group reported an increase in assaults and other crimes against them, specifically noting the difficulties their members have encountered when they've tried to urge the police to investigate and apprehend the suspects. Between September of 2007 and September of 2008, members of the Jehovah's Witness community filed 46 complaints against anti-missionary activists, most of them members of the Yad L'Achim ("Jewish Outreach") organization. According to the Jehovah's Witness' legal department, the police have stated that they responded to 15 of the 35 calls for help during that time period. "Exacerbating these tensions," the American report states, "was the widespread but false belief that proselytizing is illegal in this country."

Interestingly, despite the harassment, the report notes that the number of Messianic Jews and Evangelical Christians in Israel has grown in recent years through immigration and conversions.

The report further details how the law allows the government to subsidize approximately 60 percent of the budgets for ultra-Orthodox schools, even though these schools do not adhere to the stipulation that all educational institutions funded by the taxpayer must teach a core curriculum that includes subjects such as English, mathematics and science.

The government resources allocated to the study of religion and tradition in Arab and non-Orthodox Jewish schools are significantly lower than those allocated to Orthodox public schools. According to the Israel Religious Action Center, in 2006 the latter was granted 96 percent of the total government funding for Jewish religious education.

Dan Tamir and Gitit Ginat contributed to this report.

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Open Letter to the Board of Governors of Trondheim University Haifa, 5 November 2009

We are Arab students at the Israeli universities writing to you in support of the proposed academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. We believe that the boycott is timely and hopefully will help in upholding moral values of fairness, justice and equality which have been sorely missed in our region.

While the reason for the boycott is rightly what has been going on in the 1967 occupied territories, we propose another angle which affirms the need for boycott, namely our daily experience as Arabs in Israeli institutions. We are the lucky ones who have been able to pursue our studies in institutions of Higher Education, to which we arrived against great odds. Only very few among our generation have been qualified to attend universities due to the State's discriminatory policies. Our schools mostly lack the basic facilities needed for education, and the curriculum is structured to serve the State's goal in socializing the pupils for self-estrangement. It contains very little, if any at all, on our history and culture. Additionally, it aims to erase our historical memory and promote the official policy line of divide and rule. In short, it is modeled on curriculums that dark regimes, like Apartheid South Africa, have used to indoctrinate rather than educate. We arrive touniversities with this "educational"baggage.

The idea that Israeli universities adhere to the values of free academic institutions, where academic freedom, objectivity and meritocracy prevail is widely accepted in the West. From our experience we attest – and indeed prove beyond doubt - that this is not the case. In recent years Israeli universities have changed the criteria of acceptance to various faculties in order - as a certain president of an Israeli university put it - to prevent large number of undesirable [i.e. Arab] students from attending prestigious faculties such as Medicine and Natural Sciences. Moreover, lecturers who presented findings which are at odd with the official ideology – such as Ilan Pappe and Neve Gordon – are bullied and harassed or forced to resign. Meanwhile raw racist statements by many lecturers are considered by the administrations of the universities as benign or even objective statements. For example, recently Dr. Dan Scheuftan stated in one of his lectures: "The Arabs are the biggestfailure in the history of the human race... there's nothing under the sun that's more screwed up than the Palestinians"; "Throughout the Arab world, people fire guns at weddings in order to prove that they have at least one thing that's hard and in working order that can shoot." It goes without saying that none of these lecturers has ever been disciplined. Moreover, foreign students are warned by the security authorities of Haifa University not to visit Arab villages or towns.

Although some Israeli universities – such as the University of Haifa – pride themselves on promoting "co-existence", yet nothing is further from the truth than this. We are prevented from forming our [i.e.Arab] students' union, and racial discrimination against us – under the pretext of not serving in the army – is widely practiced in the granting of scholarships, as well as in the provision of housing at the universities' residential halls . This is particularly grave as the universities are located in Jewish towns, and Arab students face many obstacles and hardships in finding appropriate housing due to prevailing prejudices and anti-Arab sentiments in Israeli society.

Yet, the restrictions imposed on our freedom of expression are more stifling. We are not allowed to express our collective sentiments or ideas publicly. It is quite often that our public gatherings are not only violently interrupted by extreme right-wing Jewish students, but also in various occasions the universities called on the police to intervene. In several occasions, as during our peaceful demonstration in Haifa University against the War on Gaza, the police sent in large number of its special units which are infamous for their brutality (pictures and videos attached). Needless to say that they do the job they are trained for . Moreover, the universities collaborate with the internal security services (the feared Shin Bet) and provide it with names of the activists among the students who are regularly summoned, investigated and threatened.

In the end, we are hopeful that you will take a decision which reaffirms the true meaning of human values, and provide a proof that racism, religious tribalism, obfuscation and disregard for human dignity are no longer tolerated.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Most analysis of the shameful US Congressional vote on the Goldstone report have stressed the continuing power of the Israel lobby and noted that this was essentially a vote to make Israel exempt from international law – which has been more-or-less the case in practice for many years. Looking carefully into the details of the vote and comparing it to the vote to endorse Israel's assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, Philip Weiss notes that the Israel lobby has actually lost 46 votes in Congress in less than a year. While the Palestinian people have paid a high price for this – and will likely continue to pay more for such "accomplishments" – in the context of US politics, even this small change is very notable. – Joel Beinin

After Gaza, the lobby lost 46 votes in Congressby Philip Weiss on November 5, 2009 • 6 commentsHere is the evidence that between the House voting overwhelmingly in January to support Israel's Gaza slaughter (H Res 34), and the vote to condemn the Goldstone report the other day (H Res 867), the lobby lost some power. I'd say that the kryptonite was Gaza itself, which has resonated in countless ways. Though J Street may also deserve credit for giving pols political cover.

What follows is a friend's analysis of the vote. Note that a couple of the congresspeople who lost religion on Gaza had visited the place (Holt, Ellison, Edwards).H.RES.34 (JAN 09): 390 yeas, 5 nays, 22 presents, and 16 no votes.

H.RES.867 (NOV 09): 344 yeas, 36 nays, 22 presents, and 30 no votes.

Similarities and difference between January and November votes:

Compared to January, three fewer Republicans yesterday voted yea; 43 fewer Dems voted yea yesterday; the numbers of those voting present were identical; there were 14 more non-votes, which this means that 14 people could have been on the fence about speaking their minds…Abercrombie; Blumenauer; Dingell; Edwards (MD); Ellison; Grijalva; Hinchey; Kilpatrick (MI); Lee (CA); McCollum; McDermott; George Miller; Moran (VA); Olver; Stark; and Woolsey went from present in Jan to No vote yesterday

Monday, November 2, 2009

Closing of the case against New Profile has not garnered much coverage.According to Dorothy Naor of New Profile "So far, only Ynet (Yediot Ahronot) of the 3 electronic English dailies carries the good news: The investigation against New Profile has been closed! Hooray, hooray. This is a small step in the right direction. I can only hope that some day I will be able to write in glowing letters: "The occupation of Palestine has ended." Meanwhile, we have to be pleased with news (such) as this."

The Prosecution is closing its case against the New Profile movement, suspected of encouraging youths to shirk military service. Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan closed the case due to lack of culpability in the case of some of the suspects, and due to lack of evidence in the case of the others.

Police opened a criminal investigation against the movement following various publications on its website suspected of being fraudulent and inciting. Several months ago the police handed their investigation material over to the Tel Aviv District Prosecution.

Nitzan said in his ruling that while some of the publications, which led to the investigation being launched, do raise suspicion of criminal offences, sufficient admissible evidence to attribute incitement and fraudulent publications to the suspects could not be found.

He added that in the meantime, the suspicious content had been removed from the movement's website.

It should be noted that the deputy state prosecutor last year made very harsh comments against New Profile's publications. He said the severity of the incitement expressed on this website can be seen particularly in light of the fact that it tries to persuade youth to attain exemptions from military service by deceiving the system, as well as offering detailed explanations as to how to go about this.

He said this calls for a deviation from the law enforcement's generally limited policy on opening legal proceedings in cases of incitement to army evasion.

Michal Michlin-Friedlander, a senior deputy state prosecutor, notified the High Court of Justice of the decision to close the case last week.

The Prosecution was responding to the High Court of Justice following a petition filed by the Israeli Forum for the Promotion of Equal Share in the Burden to have the New Profile movement dismantled following the content published on its website.

Ruti Divon, a New Profile activist summed up the police investigation on Sunday as "a ridiculous, but also stressful experience. We already know that there is no real democracy here. A people that settles on another people cannot act democratically, but this whole ordeal shows that democracy for Jews here isn't even guaranteed."